Track Campaigns more easily
All the FundRaiser programs can help you track your campaign activity. FundRaiser Professional has a special "Campaign Management" component to help do it even more completely, but any version will allow you to do the following tips. Any of these tips will help you gather together donors and/or donations specific to any of your campaigns.
1. Code those gifts !!!
Most campaigns are made up of fundraising events. Some are physical gatherings, like walkathons, parties, etc., to encourage immediate donations. Some are awareness events, such as mailings, advertising, and so forth, which will bring donations over a period of time. In any of those cases, when gifts are received and recorded, it just makes sense to use the Motivation Code to indicate why that person gave at that event. Normally it will be a code that reflects the event during which they were asked to give, whether a mailing or a gathering. If you do this consistently, you'll be able to create Groupings, based on donations made to these codes during a particular period of time. Groupings can be used with almost all reports, so you can focus on a particular event, or on all the events within a campaign.
2. Track Mailings and Event Attendance
If you have FundRaiser Professional, then you may want to use the Campaign Management component for this. If you have Select or Spark, or just don't want the added layer of complexity Campaign Management requires in Professional, there is an alternative way to track mailings and attendance: Category Codes.
These are the most flexible of the name-record-based codes, and what is more, you can MASS ASSIGN a category code to everyone in a Grouping. This means, for mailings, especially, that, once you have the Grouping made for all the folks you want to send correspondence, you can then mass assign a category code to indicate that they got that particular mailing. You never run out of codes, and you can mark codes as "inactive" to keep the clutter down on your drop-down menus, so use category codes freely.
3. Keep an eye on ROI (Return On Investment)
With FundRaiser Professional, using the Campaign Management component, this is easy to do. Just plug in an approximate cost for the event (you can always modify it as needed), and when you do your reporting, you'll see the ROI reflected in the campaign or event summaries. Even without Professional, though, it's not that difficult to keep track of ROI. Use the Staff Tickles to jot down the expenses of specific events, so that you have a reference. Then, when you are doing a report on donations based on a particular events' Motivation Code, you'll be able to compare what has come in with what it cost to put on the event. That's all ROI is, really, and you don't have to be a math wizard to figure it out. For help with coding, reports, and the campaign management component of Professional, consider viewing training videos in the Customer Portal, or sign up for live webinar training. It will be time well spent. This article revised from the original written by Larry Weaver, 2013.
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